Beginner’s Guide

Beginner’s Guide

• Starting, Stopping, and Reloading Configuration
• Configuration File’s Structure
• Serving Static Content
• Setting Up a Simple Proxy Server
• Setting Up FastCGI Proxying

This guide gives a basic introduction to nginx and describes some simple tasks that can be done with it. It is supposed that nginx is already installed on the reader’s machine. If it is not, see the Installing nginx page. This guide describes how to start and stop nginx, and reload its configuration, explains the structure of the configuration file and describes how to set up nginx to serve out static content, how to configure nginx as a proxy server, and how to connect it with a FastCGI application.

nginx has one master process and several worker processes. The main purpose of the master process is to read and evaluate configuration, and maintain worker processes. Worker processes do actual processing of requests. nginx employs event-based model and OS-dependent mechanisms to efficiently distribute requests among worker processes. The number of worker processes is defined in the configuration file and may be fixed for a given configuration or automatically adjusted to the number of available CPU cores (see worker_processes).

The way nginx and its modules work is determined in the configuration file. By default, the configuration file is named nginx.conf and placed in the directory /usr/local/nginx/conf, /etc/nginx, or /usr/local/etc/nginx.